Ode to Joy
from Even No. 9, published spring 2018

Three times a year, the day after we close production on this magazine, a team of specialists starts burning printing plates in a factory close to the North Sea. Often, I head over from New York to supervise. One of the unforeseen pleasures of editing Even has been frequent travel to Belgium: to Bruges, where we print, and to Brussels, where I leaf through the first unbound copy of each issue. That unlovely, gray-skied, shapeshifting capital has become an art world epicenter in the last few years, and I’ve got such satisfaction from its Dadaist babble that I find myself returning to Brussels even when we’re not on press. Its nightlife is middling, its streets are dowdy, its traffic is gross. But in Brussels border-crossing is a daily habit, and it’s sexiest when it suggests to you a life beyond nations.

For the author Robert Menasse, too, the Brussels demonized as a pit of craven bureaucrats didn’t match what he saw when he moved from Vienna to the capital of Europe. Menasse was determined to write a novel that spanned cultures and languages — a book for a nascent European public, when European unity was at its nadir — and there was one city to do it in. While Greeks agonized and Germans griped, Menasse found in Brussels a class of far-flung inhabitants who’d left behind their families, and even their tongues, to forge concord in diversity. “A mentality only becomes a culture,” Menasse learned in Brussels, “once it is freed from national obsession.” It was the stuff of art, and it became The Capital, the first postnational novel for a community of 24 languages.

After orbiting southern Africa, east Asia, and the United States, here is a profoundly European issue of Even — one which skates across borders that the children of Schengen are shocked to see rising again. In Brussels we speak to the Scottish painter Lucy McKenzie, whose cosmopolitan art faces a Brexit-induced obstruction. In Germany and Switzerland, James McAuley wrestles with the history of collecting at a pair of exhibitions that feel more like crime scenes. Two Italians, the sculptor Giuseppe Penone and the photographer Michele Borzoni, cast their eyes on a peninsula transformed by big business, a changing climate, and new arrivals from across the Med.

We’ve been assured for decades that there was no such thing anymore as an avant-garde; the world was too large, and art too diverse, for any one strand or style to place itself at the forefront. And as a creative matter that’s surely right. What’s needed instead is an avant-garde of identity — one that tries to contrive, out of boggling multiplicity, a new populace of laws and letters. Think of authors like Robert Menasse and artists like Lucy McKenzie as homesteaders, calling a borderless future into being by living it themselves. Think of Brussels as our proving ground, the place where we learn if we can really live together.

—Jason Farago, editor